6 minute read
02/02/2017
Once you’ve conducted customer research and developed a marketing strategy, you’re ready for the next step in the process: measuring the effectiveness of your social media.
Our latest article in the Business Hacks series will guide you through measuring and evaluating your social media content and channels. By analysing everything, you’ll be able to discover what works, what doesn’t and what to do in order to get better results by making sense of data.
Check out our guide to discover the five points to social media success.
Measure the visibility of your social media profiles
Metrics to look out for: Reach, Impressions, Views
Discover ways of increasing your exposure by measuring reach, impressions and views. Compare your tweets and see which formats get the best reach and impressions. These formats can include images, hashtags, URLs or videos. You’ll find that different combinations of content (words, images, video, offers) and paid advertising provoke very different outcomes.
Reach– The total number of people who can see your content.
Impressions– The total number of times your content is displayed (but not necessarily seen or engaged with).
The Twitter Analytics dashboard displays a 27-day summary of your tweets, including the total impressions and reach of your content during that period. Not only that, you can click on each tweet and discover the individual impressions and all other interactions such as likes and retweets.
Followerwonk, a third-party tool, lets you delve deeper into your analytics and see a more granular view of where your followers are and how to match your activity to their reactions and expectations.After clicking on your Facebook Page Insights management tab, you’ll be able to see your overall reach, as well as how it differed to the previous period. Additionally, you can check the reach and impressions of each post on your business page.
LinkedIn Company Page administrators can view the analytics for Company Pages. Just go to the Company Page and click the Analytics page. It’ll display information about everything from page traffic and activity to demographics. When you’re logged in check out theAnalytics tabto see the impressions of all your posts.
Measure how many people see your content
Metrics to look out for: Page views, unique visitors, length of visits
Page views–The total number of views on your page you’re measuring (i.e. a product page visitors land on after clicking a link in a tweet).
Unique visitors– The total number of distinct visitors during a specific time period.
Length of visits– The length of time a visitor spends on your content before exiting the page (important because it lets you know whether content is keeping their attention or not).
One of the quickest ways to get more people to see your content and increase the time they spend on content is to measure the interaction. If something is more popular, it’s worth doing more of the same to get more people of a similar demographic to see it. A tool likeGoogle Analyticswill show you who clicked on the content you’ve linked to in your social posts, such as a blog post, a product page or a video.
If people are clicking through to product guides from Facebook posts but ignoring them on LinkedIn, it shows you that there’s an issue with content and it’s time to re-examine how you talk to different audiences.
Measure interaction on your profiles
Metrics to look out for: Likes, shares, favourites, replies
Engagement is how much and how often people interact with your profile and your content. It’s one of the clearest ways to see whether your content is being seen by anyone and how much they like it or find it useful.
Each platform has their own way of measuring interaction, which is broken down in the following ways:
The following count toward the total engagements, which can be seen on the analytics dashboard and the tweet activity.
Replies– When a user sends a tweet directly @ your account
Retweet– When a user shares your content to their followers
Like– When a user likes your tweet
New followers– When a new user follows your account
Comments– When a user posts a comment about your content.
Reactions– When a user reacts to your content (i.e. likes, happy, sad, angry, love)
Share– When a user shares your content to their friends
Page likes– When a new user likes your business’ page
Page follows– When a new user follows your brand to receive updates without clicking the like button
Like– When a user likes your content
Comments– When a user posts a comment about your content
LinkedIn Company Page followers– When a new user follows your Company page
Like– When a user likes your content
Comments– When a user posts a comment about your content
Followers– When a new user follows your page
As a general rule; the bigger the numbers the better. Just make sure to monitor responses and replies – arguments and misconstrued meanings from content can turn into PR disasters. It’s also another way to discover what types of content people best respond to and use that to gain exposure to new, existing and lapsed customers.
To extend the reach of posts and attract new followers, try to work with the social platforms. Create competitions that require people to follow you and share a post (which works well when combined with a hashtag you’ve created), as well as giving them a reason to come back. i.e. announcing a new product soon or an upcoming sale that they won’t want to miss.
Boost social relationship building
Metrics to look out for: Fans and followers Social media relationship building is all about conversations. In the old days of the internet, people went into broadcast mode, sending posts and opinions without listening to the reception. By putting the ‘social’ in social media you can give your brand and your content a human face and give people a reason to keep coming back. Not only that, small businesses have a chance to show the passion you have for your brand and your products, which will make you stand out in a positive way.
Tools like BuzzSumo lets you see what content has been shared most on social platforms – both from your own domain and from other businesses. You can also discover what social influencers in your field are writing about and get inspired for ways to attract and retain an audience by producing similar content.
To make the most of this, why not install theBufferbrowser or mobile app to add content from all over the web to your posting schedule? People will keep coming back if they see something they like. Curating other people’s content is an easy way to give your fans something they’ll appreciate without the time intensive nature of creating your own from scratch.
For Instagram, useIconosquareto discover where your followers are from, how many you’re losing or gaining and map it to the content that you’re posting and when the best time to post is. If you get a surge in followers after posting something specific, you know to do more of it.
Boost revenue from sales and increase new customers and orders
Metrics to look for: New orders, new customers, sales revenue
According to studies, 70% of customers review 4+ pieces of content before purchase. To make sure they see the right content, which convinces them to buy your products or services, you need to analyse your content and the customer journey in a new way.
kissmetricsanalyses the behaviour of customers and helps you to discover how to make more visitors become customers. By seeing what customers are responding to, you can align your ideas and sales initiatives with proven behaviour. It integrates with lots of apps and platforms like Shopify and MailChimp and reveals exactly how many people arrive from each channel, making it easy to monitor analyse all of your marketing and ecommerce channels in one place.
And now you know how to analyse and measure the effectiveness of your social media content and make sure all future content is helping you to meet your business objectives.